Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing
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Exhalation is one of my favorites. There is profound lesson about the nature of the mind, expressed simply as a sequence of discovery by a lone scientist in a very alien world. But the world is an idealized, simplified version of our own with much simpler source of work in the physics sense. I very much wanted to know more about the nature of that world, and for the people there to find a way out of their apocalyptic predicament. But that story, like it's world, is hermetically sealed perfection. The fate of our own universe is the same, but with more steps in the energy cycle and a longer timeline. The silence bounding that story is a beautiful choice, one that makes it a real jewel.
I just didn't feel like discussing the satire angle was very interesting! In the article:
> In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true2. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct.
I think this section makes it very clear that in one sense, it's a clear satire of religion, or at least Creationism (implied: we do not see this, so it's implausible we're in a YE Creationist world). I didn't think it was worth spelling it out. Also overall I thought anti-religious satire in fiction is fairly common (I remember reading Candide in high school, and Pullman around the same time or a little earlier) and far from what makes Chiang special.
Agree with your thoughts on Exhalation. I hope they make it out, but also completely understand why Chiang ended the story where he did.
I think the thermodynamics works the same and you've nailed it by describing it as hermetically sealed perfection. It's a simpler world where a self-aware being can see and almost feel the march of entropy and their own brief existence being part of that.
His own explanation of Hell is The Absence of God seems to suggest otherwise too. "He also said that the novelette examines the role of faith in religion, and suggests that if God undeniably existed, then faith would no longer be applicable."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Is_the_Absence_of_God#Bac...
I kind of see both sides of that.
On the "agree" side, I saw a quote somewhere that said, "that's why it's called 'faith' instead of 'reading comprehension'." If it were that cut and dried, then it would just be a matter of objectively evaluating the evidence, without even any "probably".
On the "disagree" side, the point of faith isn't really the existence of God. Yes, that's the starting point. But much further than that, the point is that we need God's forgiveness - a forgiveness that is completely unreasonable. Faith is "you have, I need, please give" (contrast with love, which is "I have, you need, I give"). The difference between those two postures is why it is faith, rather than love, that is the fundamental bottom line in dealing with God. Knowledge - even certainty - that God exists doesn't remove the need for a faith that goes beyond mere knowledge.
1. We see often where people deny an objective choice. Even those choices that are predominately 'good' and instead choose those that are predominately 'destructive'.
2. A choice to accept forgiveness is exceedingly difficult as the first step is to accept limits of your own power. That is to say, you must accept another's greater ability to forgive than your own.
In either case, regardless of the objective nature of the 'choice' they remain difficult for humans to make.
"I don't comprehend what's going on and can hardly read, therefore my views about an invisible sky, man which cannot be proven in any way, are valid"
"I don't understand the world, and it sometimes seems unfair, so I find comfort in trusting there's some all seeing power who has a plan. I don't understand the plan because I'm flawed, but I trust the plan exists. In the end, I trust this powerful being will reward the just and punish the unjust (or redeem them by showing them the evil of their ways)".
As an atheist, I don't subscribe to this worldview at all, but I can see how it could comfort people. It's a way to explain the unexplainable, and to face the uncertainty of death, illness and tragedy.
"he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified"
To get a better understanding of these things, I recommend checking out "The Experience of God" by D.B. Hart or the works of C.S. Lewis.
Why would one need forgiveness from their creator? He created us and the universe we exist in. There is nothing we do or think that is not a result of his design, so why should we ask forgiveness for doing exactly what we were designed to do?
It would be like expecting an AI I created to ask forgiveness from me for something bad it did, this is ridiculous, it's the creators fault not the creations.
> Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they're there, they know they're there for a purpose, they'd probably agree that they have a place in a well-organised universe, but they wouldn't see the point of believing, of going around saying "O great table, without whom we are as naught." Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe in them or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.
Exhalation is a good example of the same method applied to physics. The narrator dissects himself and his world with patient clarity, and in the process he reveals the same fragility that we face. The beauty of the story is that it does not rage against entropy or wrap it up in metaphors. It accepts the facts of decline and finds meaning in understanding them. That is why it feels sealed and perfect, as you say. The restraint is what gives it emotional weight.
SPOILERS
In the story they successfully build a tower to the base of heaven and breakthrough, only to find themselves to have looped back to Earth. The implication I took from this is that heaven and earth are one and the same. This isn’t necessarily a refutation of religion or God, and in fact aligns with many religious beliefs. I wouldn’t even see it as “cosmic horror” or something that implies “we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature”.
Then again, the nuance in Chiang’s stories that allows for very different, but reasonable interpretations is one of the things that makes him enjoyable.
I want to nitpick two things.
On compatibalism, the first definition presented is the correct one, the framing that "you have to make peace with determinism" isn't quite right. For compatiablists, determinism is freedom, because if one's actions did not follow from prior causes then they would not align with one's internal states.
The other is sneaking in the characterization of Chiang's AI doomer skepticism as a "blindspot". This topic is being debated to death on HN every day so I'll leave that argument for another thread, but IMO it contradicts the tone of the article about a writer whose depth of thought the author was just heaping praise on. I'm not saying its necessary to adopt his views on all things, but I think it deserved more than a footnote dismissal.
Re #1 It's been several years since I read up on that area of philosophy. I'll need to reread some stuff to decide whether I think the definition I used is a fine enough simplification for sci-fi readers (and, well, myself) vs whether it missed enough nuances that it's essentially misleading.
(Some academic philosophers follow me on substack so maybe they'll also end up correcting me at some point!)
Re #2 ah I don't think of it as "sneaking in". It's more like "this is a view I have, this is a view many of my readers likely also have, given that this is a widely debated topic (as you say) and I'm not going to change anybody's minds on the object level I'm just going to mention it and move on."
I understand you cannot write as if walking on egg shells; you have your position and maybe your readers do as well. But this is far from a settled matter, and Chiang's position (which was describing earlier rather than current LLMs, but I still think it arguably holds today) is arguably correct, or valid. I probably agree with Chiang more than I agree with you, which is why I find it odd to call it a blind or weak spot as if the matter was settled. Maybe "while I admire Chiang, I fundamentally disagree on some topics, such as LLMs" would have felt less jarring.
(Not saying you must write like this, and it's impossible to write in a way nobody will object to. I'm just explaining why I -- and presumably the person you're responding to -- found it jarring).
I don't think the article was written by an LLM, but I'm convinced it was LLM-enabled. Which is a pity, because the author seems to have some interesting things to say. But that's the problem with leaning on an LLM: you lose your own voice, and good writing is centred around voice.
I thought the author was talking about Chiang's famous statement about LLMs being "lossy compression", and was ready to admit LLMs progress so fast this may not be the full picture.
However, this is not the author's actual criticism! TFA's states:
> I won't belabor obvious points like his nonfictional views on current-generation LLMs being surprisingly shallow [footnote]
The footnote then links to an alleged "rebuttal" to Chiang by Scott Alexander, link here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/15/maybe-the-real-superin...
This alleged "rebuttal" is actually referencing this Buzzfeed article by Ted Chiang: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-dang....
Regardless of whether you agree or not with Ted Chiang, his article isn't about "current-generation LLMs"... it's about unchecked capitalism and the fears of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs (at the risk of misrepresenting Chiang, he's saying it's ironic that Silicon Valley's worst fears resemble a sort of unchecked, rampant capitalism).
You don't need to agree with Chiang to realize he's article is sort of neutral on AI/LLM, and is actually a criticism of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs! TFA's author cannot critique his views on capitalism as "shallow" just because he disagrees with them, or misrepresent them as being about state-of-the-art AI/tech when they are actually about capitalism.
How could the article's author (and Scott Alexander) completely miss this?
Most people believe in free will, most people also believe that their actions follow from prior causes, and most people also believe in moral desert, so most people are definitionally compatibalists.
The typical framing where people are asked to go back in time and imagine redoing past events without memory of the future pumps their intuition for time travel fiction where doing things differently is the entire point of the scenario. If you ask people "if everything happened exactly as it happened, could you alter the past to change the future?" most people would say no.
"Singleton": what if many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory was real?
The Orthogonal trilogy, starting with "The Clockwork Rocket": what if space-time was Riemannian rather than Lorentzian? Physics explained at https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html
Dichronauts is very similar; in a universe with a slight tweak to the laws of physics, we spend most of the book exploring the consequences of that tweak, but also the experiences of the characters living in it, some of which are a consequence of their world, and some of which feel like situations we could very easily find on our planet.
Also Exhalation is a beautiful story that captures the fact that all life and intelligence lives in the space between low entropy and high entropy. So it's not different thermodynamics.
But overall I align with the sense of admiration the OP has for Ted Chiang. He explores "what if" scenarios with such mastery I feel like I had a dip in a fresh water pool after a read.
Another of my favs (including the title itself) is "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom".
Folks please be gentle with the downvotes. I tried an email but can't seem to make it work!
> In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently
The whole point of this story is to explain thermodynamics (or entropy). He wrote a little note! I can’t begin to believe this was written by a human who’s really read Chiang.
Prompting "Which Ted Chiang story depicts a universe where thermodynamics works differently" led to hallucinating that Exhalation is the answer (instead of correctly stating that no story does this) with high logprobs by GPT 4.5, 4.1, o3, Claude 4 and DeepSeek R1.
Only GPT 5 and Claude 4.1 gave correct answers repeatedly (on repeated sampling in their case instead of logprobs).
If you're wondering about the apparently unusual depth of checking logprobs across different versions, I have a pre-existing applet for that which was built for checking some categories of press releases in my industry.
On the basis of that, the priming simulates the same scenario, since there is no feasible way to recreate the author's method of writing an article with unknown essay-writing prompts and a set of unknown proportions of AI to human-generation for different elements of content and editing.
> Science fiction writers used to like technology. For some reason, this has become increasingly uncommon, even passé. Doubly so for Western writers, and quadruply so for Western, literary, “humanist” writers.
I found myself in agreement that Ted Chiang is one of the best scifi writers alive today, but disagreed with other points (that his understanding of then-current LLMs was weak -- I thought Chiang's lossy compression metaphor was on point -- or that he should somehow optimize his output to write more stories -- something one of the commenters from TFA deftly rebutts), but I still think it's a human who wrote most of the article.
Happy to be corrected by the author if he wrote it using LLMs. I'm not immune to being fooled; my objection to LLMs is not "they aren't good enough" but instead "I want to talk to humans, not bots".
This might be presumptuous of me, but I do not believe current-generation AIs are capable of writing articles of the quality level of my nonfiction writing. I think they have a) lower quality and quantity of overall insight, particular on philosophy-adjacent topics, b) lower ability to be appropriately confident in making claims well[1], and c) noticeably worse ability to "write well", subjectively defined (eg weaker sentences, less deft use of metaphors and references, tries too hard to force a point when there's nothing there, etc).
Honestly I find myself slightly offended by the comparison, though I acknowledge it's one of the things where 2-3 generations down the line AIs might well surpass me at.
I think "blurry jpeg" misses the point, for most practical questions. It conflates substrate and developmental history with emergent capabilities and consequences, and is only one step up from saying "AI is just 1s and 0s"
[1] To be clear this is something I have not mastered, I'm just saying AIs never seem to get this well, though maybe I'm just bad at prompting. In particular there's a particular "internet slop"-style that they go to very quickly, and when I try to prime them away from that they sound fake in a different direction.
I loved Arrival but never really bothered to look into Story of Your Life or its author. I guess now I have to go and read all of Chiang's work... Stories about consistent fictional science are indeed a rarity. This is also why I like Sam Hughes' work (aka qntm) - he does this pretty well himself.
Without giving too many spoilers away, the short story's plot is simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different from the movie. YMMV on which one you prefer, fans are divided.
In my experience people who read the short story first prefer the story, and people who watch the movie first prefer the movie. But you might be different! Just read it first and report back what you feel!
With that said, trying to compare the two would be like trying to compare apples and oranges. Films and prose are two separate mediums. Some things which work well in one don't work in the other. It's like the difference between 2001 the film vs. 2001 the book - perhaps my favorite example since they were simultaneously written and directed as counterparts to each other (as opposed to one being based on the other, as is usually the case).
Chiang’s exploration of ideas epitomizes the ideal to which I hold science fiction (as opposed to science fantasy, which I also enjoy as a guilty pleasure).
To name a few: the movie is way more sentimental -- I subscribe to the notion that "less is more" when trying to stir emotion, and I think Villeneuve overdid it -- and also has your standard "big movie" thriller/suspense/action moments that are completely unnecessary and are only there to make the movie commercially viable. I understand why they are there, but they are still blemishes.
To be fair, some things only work in the movie and are bits of genius, like when Louise suddenly asks why she's getting all these mental images of an unknown girl -- only then the viewer understands she's not remembering something from the past. It's a surprising moment and, to my recollection, it's only in the movie. Even if I misremember and it was in the story, the visual element works better.
The short story is perfect.
yeah, I don't understand the change tbh.
It's said Eric Heisserer spent years and years on the screenplay so I'm assuming he couldn't sell the original version. But it's a bit like making fight club and removing the big reveal. It ends up feeling the same, but not having the same impact and meaning almost the opposite.
You’re going to have a great time reading those 2 anthologies.
If you haven't already done so, check out The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling.
Oh and "I think he doesn’t understand the power of this singularity-level technology he just introduced." <- I think he does, but this take would make for a much more boring and less powerful story.
Not addressed in tfa but there is one story where writing is first introduced in a society, and before that they had 2 concepts of truth: "The real truth" and "What all parties find convenient". So powerful, I think we do this more that we think, see also that story about that guy that needs coming to terms with his own memory.
Read Ted Chiang people. Any new book of his is an insta-buy for me. I think Greg Egan is up there with Ted Chiang btw, his stories are much longer but still have this high level of scientific and thoroughly structured imagination.
The last line always gets me.
In each story, the gimmick(tm) is thoroughly examined and extrapolated in an internally-consistant way, but that is excellent world-building, and independent of genre.
1. As exemplified by Tower of Babylon which wouldn't be out of place in a fantasy anthology.
2. Understand is probably his number 2 "hardest" SF story. The way it is told is closer to a character study on the effects of human super-intelligence (unbelievably authored in 1991). Exhalation is no. 1, and it's focus is still very "soft" SF.
Ted Chiang has an alternate definition though, I prefer that one to be honest. His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply [0]. Under that definition, even what we would colloquially call magic (ex. turning lead to gold) would be called sci-fi, as long as everyone could do it; once you have that, you can do things like mechanize it and make factories to do it at scale, and there’s where you get the interesting second order problems.
Under that definition, I think Tower of Babylon is better considered sci-fi, because there are no “special people”. The new rules of the universe also lead interesting second order effects: the tower gets so tall that entire families live in the tower, and people are born and die in the tower [1].
[0] - better explained him here: https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html, see “You have very specific views on the difference between magic and science. Can you talk about that?”
[1] - I don’t know if Chiang intended this, but I think you could probably draw a parallel to missionaries to the new world.
> His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply
His definition can get fuzzy at the edges - Understand and The Story of Your Life has very special narrators - does it matter why they're special? They could have been a seventh son of a seventh son, foretold by prophecy, gotten abilities from a magic potion, or a burst of gamma rays. It's just that the premise of the stories is science fiction-y. I've just realized the protagonists of "A Wizard of Earthsea" and "The Story of Your Life" have similar beats in their stories, despite belonging to different genres.
Charles Stross (hi!) retconned the Merchant Princes series from straight parallel-worlds fantasy into parallel-worlds SF on book 3 or 4 of the series (it might have been part of lightly rewriting 6 novellas into a trilogy). The transition was seamless, the distinction between Science Fiction and Science Fantasy is gossamer thin.
I find my own ontology to be useful for myself and others, but I don't begrudge others their preferred definitions.
Very cerebral and great storytelling. The Chiang story where the mathematician discovers the horrible truth that 1+1=3 while her husband discovers he doesn't love her is ... I think Lem (or Dick) would be proud to have pulled that off.
Note: someone else commented that Chiang often seems dryer than PK Dick, which can make C feel like more work to read. Maybe that might be true sometimes :). But maybe it's only on the surface. If that makes sense. Chiang is condensed. Dick is ... not condensed.
Didn't PKD even write a nightmarish story about god and angels being literally true and punishing the infidel that echoes Chiang's story about "Hell.."?
I don't think Chiang is drier than PKD. I think he's a saner PKD, without the tendency to psychedelic ramblings. I say this as an absolute fan of PKD!
I remember reading this short story and being obsessed with the consequences. It immediately solves P = NP, and makes guarding secrets way way way harder. This is the first time I've heard someone else mention it.
HPMOR had a similar technology (the time turners) and threw up defensive cannon early:
> If this worked, Harry could use it to recover any sort of answer that was easy to check but hard to find. He wouldn't have just shown that P=NP once you had a Time-Turner, this trick was more general than that. Harry could use it to find the combinations on combination locks, or passwords of every sort. Maybe even find the entrance to Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets, if Harry could figure out some systematic way of describing all the locations in Hogwarts. It would be an awesome cheat even by Harry's standards of cheating.
> Harry took Paper-2 in his trembling hand, and unfolded it.
> Paper-2 said in slightly shaky handwriting:
> DO NOT MESS WITH TIME
I'm a huge SciFi fan, especially Ted Chiang. I perceive his styles to be quite varied and creative. I think that he does a good job of portraying the "awe" of "awe-inspiring discovery".
I like some of Yudkowsky's shorter fiction but I could never get into HPMOR. The writing style just comes across as too smarmy. I know it's intentional but I still can't get past it (I had trouble with Thomas Covenant) as well.
As I see it, free will is a perspective - not something true or false, just looking at things from a certain angle. Knowledge of future is another one - and it is incompatible with free will. You can choose, you can know the future, but not both.
This is being overly kind. "What if religion was actually true?" does not create a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws; it creates a universe full of impossibility from which you then pick and choose one or two things to focus on, and end up with not science fiction but fantasy.
The difference between science and religion doesn't lie in disagreement over particular facts or any facts at all, the difference is in the approach. Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well). Science is built around making verifiable predictions but doesn't in fact give any answers, only theories that are (mostly) consistent with observable events (so far). They can however agree or disagree over any particular set of facts. Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.
> science is built around making verifiable
> predictions but doesn't in fact give any
> answers, only theories
Darwin didn't know a lot of things about evolution or biology, and I'm sure he had questions about some of those things. If you could talk to him today you could give him answers to those questions, and the reason for that is that those answers are found in theories and scientific progress in general.
But yes, it doesn't provide "answers" in the mushy religious sense, i.e. "what is it all for?".
> The difference between science and
> religion doesn't lie in disagreement
> over particular facts or any facts at all
Do you think Galileo clashed with the Catholic church over heliocentrism because the church didn't understand what religion should and shouldn't be making claims about?
"Answers" in a common sense are supposed to be "true" and "permanent" or at least that's how I understand the word.
EDIT apparently the comment above got extended, so I'll address some of newer points too.
> You're just implicitly excluding all the parts where religious texts make empirical claims about reality as unimportant or allegory, because religion has already lost those arguments.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying all these claims can be as well true in a different (fully consistent and scientific) world. Furthermore, if you assume we live in a simulation then basically anything becomes possible in OUR world too, including Jesus walking on water turned into wine. It's just our simulation overlords had a good sense of humor.
The reason why we don't usually consider simulation theories is not because they're false (this can't be proven), but because they aren't practical and don't predict much. Even if we do live in a simulation, this simulation so far seems to follow some consistent internal "laws" so we can as well study those. Not that it means anything, but helps us to exterminate those who neglect these laws so it's a survivorship bias in action.
I would argue that answers are supposed to be useful for the purpose motivating the question.
Q: What is the price of gas? A1: The number of units of some other good or service demanded by a seller in echange for a given quantity of it. A2: about $4.00/gal
A1 is, I would say, both "true" and "permanent". Assuming it is at least approximately accurate, though, A2 is much more of an answer in most cases the question is asked, even though it is at perhaps only approximately and in any case at best transitorily true.
The goal of religious study is to try to prove that it is not impossible, not that it is a probably reading of what happened. To find some absurd way of reconciling different stories. I have no idea how you can call that an answer.
Furthermore, even though you can argue that science can give some answers, it definitely under-delivers on questions like "what is good and evil" or "why you should have kids". Some of those are covered by the "humanism" neoreligion, some of them aren't. This whole experiment is very modern, it's not clear what are long-term survival rates of societies that completely give up on religions in a classical sense. It could turn out that societies that believe in nonsense have an edge over the ones that don't, after all this matches our experience all the way up until the 20th century.
The scary part is that there may not be a good or evil, and the answers we have are just made up stuff.
That's the only remotely rational view of it that I'm aware of. "Remotely" because without some kind of religion it doesn't follow that outcompeting other societies or survival in general is "good".
So in the end yes, I do believe "good and evil" are made up. Luckily, it's not a bad thing.
I think there is a huge distinction to what it’s good for the average person in society vs what is good for the rulers, and it is unclear which one of those you mean.
Most religions are here to support the rulers.
I mean it in the most brutal sense, maximizing replication and persistence of religion bearers (you can say average person in society).
In a short term religions can benefit current rulers, but in a long term selection must be geared towards survival of societies and cultures as a whole, otherwise they wouldn't have lived into the modern age.
No, it doesn't.
I mean, it does the horoscope thing where it makes predictions vague enough that people can retrospectively fit whatever actually happens into them easily, but that's not actually predicting very well.
Religions are a lot more than just codified traditions, but yes, some traditions are have benefits. That doesn't mean that the religion as a whole is good at predicting anything, it just means that they occasionally preserve things that are beneficial. But because what is codified is codified without systematic knowledge of what works or how it works, the preservation of benefit is essentially random with weak selective pressure acting in the aggregate of beliefs, and with a very big "past utility is no guarantee of future utility" even on the bits that are useful, because the utility of the tradition may be tied to conditions that are not preserved, while the tradition itself is blindly perserved.
But you agree this must be much better than random? Evolutionary pressure on species is also rather weak: unfit specimen survive and fit specimen die due to chance all the time. But look where it got us when averaged over long periods of time.
I don't buy the "systematic knowledge of what works or how it works" part. That's what NLP scientists used to say about neural nets while building monstrous systems based on "systematic knowledge of grammar". You definitely don't have to understand "how it works" to be able to make good predictions.
Well, no, without a definition of what domain it is supposed to be better in, and what the actual alternative it is being compared to more concretely than "random" (irreligious humans don't behave randomly, and, in fact, even without religion preserve traditions, some of which are useful), and probably some argument to make the case, no, I'm not going to agree with that.
> You definitely don't have to understand "how it works" to be able to make good predictions.
You have to actually make predictions to make predictions, certainly. And religion is manifestly very bad at making predictions where it does make them, and the things you are talking about are very much not predictions, they are memes in the original sense.
The majority of atheists globally believe in astrology (because of the large number of atheists in China, IIRC).
But, you triggered me lol:
1.) The Chinese meaning of "atheist" may not mean what you think it means: a.) it means not following a major established religion, and b.) they have an Orwellian surveillance-state dictatorship government which very much opposes major established religions
2.) For many people, including in China, astrology is just something like buying a lottery ticket, or asking the Magic 8-Ball for advice — fun, but not something actually believed in[1].
3.) It's much more likely that 3% of atheists "believe in" astrology[2] — and the idea that a majority would is insane on its face
So yeah, nah.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/05/21/3-in-10-amer...
[2]: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/11/42552/
Even in the US the group most likely to believe in astrology as the "nothing in particular" - non religious but not strongly identifying as atheist or agnostic.
Most Chinese people say they are "convinced atheists"[1] so I find your first claim unconvincing. Yes, they live in a dictatorship, but the dictatorship's promotion of atheism is what makes them atheist - they are brainwashed (in a casual, not formal, sense) into it.
Even when asked more specific questions about belief they are atheists. Its not just fear of government because they will admit to superstitious practices the state also disapproves of in the same surveys[2].
Claiming Chinese atheists are not really atheists is a no true Scotsman argument. They say they are atheists, their beliefs about religious things are atheist.
> and the idea that a majority would is insane on its face
It might to fit what you think atheists should believe, but the evidence points to it being true.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150430232945/http://www.wingia...
[2]https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/05/chinese-c...
Even if you expand your claim to add fengshui, it's entirely plausible that only about 10% of the Chinese population are atheists who believe in fengshui. That would mean only 17% of Chinese atheists believe in fengshui.
At the very least its an indicator that atheist and superstition are a common combination.
The very least is even less than what I wrote: it's the smallest possible overlap between convinced atheists and fengshui believers: (47-(100-61)) = 8% of the population being both.
You can call it common if you want, but again I don't see how you'd get from that to anywhere near "the majority of atheists globally believe in astrology".
Saying that religious predictions use the same style of vagueness that allows people to retrospectively reconstruct them to match facts as horoscopes is not a claim that horoscopes are a religious belief.
> The majority of atheists globally believe in astrology
Even assuming this is true, what relevance does it have to the discussion?
What religious predictions? Religions do not generally make many predictions.
Religions tend to not make a lot of predictions, but they do make some (there's kind of an inverse relation between size and durability of religion and the number and specificity of predictions, though.)
But, if they didn't make any, they wouldn't have a special word for it ("prophecy").
The only prophecies that were predictions I can think of with regard to Christianity were Jewish prophecies of a messiah. The Jewish prophets were leaders, not soothsayers.
> there's kind of an inverse relation between size and durability of religion and the number and specificity of predictions, though
I would question that - things like the Oracle at Delphi lasted a long time. So did fortune telling (mostly non-religious) around the world. How long as astrology lasted?
You really can't. They're very different.
> It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not.
True enough. But such a world would be very different from a world in which the bible was literally true, and a world in which the bible is actually literally true is genuinely scientifically impossible. You would have to redefine an unimaginably large number of things and you would still have a world full of impossible contradictions to the point that nothing could be said.
> Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.
You can't, because the beliefs are fundamentally unscientific and self-contradictory. There is no possible world in which the god that actually religious people believe in exists as they believe in him; there are possible worlds in which an entity with approximately the same gross physical properties exists, but such an entity is nothing like the actual religious god.
Why not? I don't think it's likely and I definitely don't build my life under an assumption that this is true.
However I just can't see how this can be ruled out by scientific means. Our world doesn't have to follow any laws at all, this whole thing can be a bad dream of a sleeping giant.
If you took that hypothesis seriously you'd still be able to apply predictions and laws. Giving up on trying to understand it is what's unscientific.
You mean, like those silly science fiction stories where FTL travel is possible? Or time travel?
FTL or time travel are not necessarily unscientific - we know that relativity permits CTCs to exist, they're something that can be explored rigorously and scientifically. Even for stories that adopt decidedly unscientific handwave versions, one dropped stitch won't necessarily unravel the whole garment, especially when it's not the focus - if you're telling a story about life on Omicron Persei 3, how one gets to Omicron Persei 3 may well be beside the point. But yes if a story is full of things like that, even for things that are the focus of the story, then it's not science fiction.
I'm fairly certain simulating 16 billion years of physics (or 6000) in a shorter timeframe than 16 billion years (or 6000) is, in fact, scientifically impossible. Mathematically impossible, even, because it leads to absurd consequences such as the simulator being able to simulate itself faster than itself.
Scifi --to me, but to many others as well-- is a thought experiment in prose. Like any work of fiction, it needs to have some consistency, but certainly not total. We can "suspend our disbelief."
The story you refer to is consistent, though. It stays away from details that would break that. It can do that, because (1) realism is not the goal of the story, and (2) a practically omnipotent God is given, which allows every possible scenario.
Then what, for you, is the distinction between Sci-fi and Fantasy? I think if you draw that line where most people draw it and think through what Chiang is actually doing, he's on the other side of it.
I don't think the distinction is meaningful. The lack of a line is why we ended up with the term speculative fiction.
In sci-fi, there's often an (hypothetical) future setting/environment/world involved, but that doesn't really define the difference. The important part in sci-fi is how the events evolve in and how the characters react to and interact with that world, and how that particular definition of that world determines the outcome. The fantasy part is the main ingredient. It's a thought-experiment.
Chiang sets up a world, and his interest is in how that world affects "us" (the characters). It's not about the "arch" of the characters, but it's about the effect the world has on them.
Hell, our own understanding of the universe is barely self consistent.
I don’t know which of his works it’s based on, so can’t say how true it is to the original, but I enjoyed it.
Like the other comment said, this isn't a Ted Chiang adaptation though, it's based on a few short stories by Ken Liu. You can read one of the stories here:
https://bigthink.com/high-culture/ken-liu-short-story/
However, in this case I think the TV adaptation did a better job with the story than the original short.
Really tells you both how talented he is, and how different stories just speak to different people.
I’m not really sure this matters. The ideas are interesting for their effects on the characters of the story—going in depth on the world building outside of the characters doesn’t really mean anything. For the author’s example: yes, economic experiments and drug experiments would be cheaper, but like… so what? What does that mean for the characters in the story? His stories aren’t an exploration of ideas for their own sake, they’re created with a purpose, and this middle level world building doesn’t move that purpose forward at all.
I didn't know this was discredited? Is it? I thought this was still being studied.
Chiang is great. I think of him as the last good writer, as reviewers seemed to stop acknowledging anything good after his Exhalations, which was just before the culture was fully consumed by spasms. Maybe there is an opportunity, where AI will polarize the market for fiction, and the best stuff becomes a super valuable and rarefied pleasure against a backdrop of formulaic genre fiction and AI slop?
Wow, thanks for enlightening the unwashed masses of Ted Chiang fans.
One nitpick is that Black Mirror is usually dystopian in its view of technology but there has been more than 1 happy ending. The author probably only has San Junipero fresh in their mind.